What is most interesting to me about this is that patents were originally created to encourage companies to share their designs instead of hording trade secrets. In the current climate, however, many companies are more inclined to keep their products closed source rather than risk having someone sue them for patent violation. Perversely, a highly litigious patent climate encourages the exact behavior that patents were intended to remedy.
The question for me is should it be illegal to create a domain with a similar name to an active domain and setup an email server with similar names? I don't see anything wrong with this. There could legitimately be two companies with similar names. If the companies received each other's emails, would a crime or tort have been committed?
This seems to me to be one of those cases where the wrong laws are being applied. He used legitimate tools to further a criminal enterprise. In my opinion, he should be charged for extortion, unjust enrichment, or conversion, http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Conversion_(law), but not for illegally intercepting communications.
As far as I can tell, your post is in complete agreement with mine. Nokia and Motorola preferred patent cross-licensing. Apple felt their patents were being undervalued by those companies. In the case with Nokia, Apple had to make sizable cash payments in lieu of licensing what they considered their core patents for the iPhone.
Two story lines really interest me here. First, Apple entering, and effectively disrupting, the phone market. These companies are used to patent cross-licensing in order to create market stability. Enter Apple, which really doesn't seem to be interested in stability, but rather enjoy being disruptive (I am not using disruptive in a negative sense here). Secondly, the difficulty in valuing Apple's software patents versus the established companies hardware patents. None of the big established companies valued Apple's patents very high (or not nearly as high as Apple values their own patents). As the phone market continues to move toward more software driven products, this will continue to be a big issue.
Motorola offered Apple the same deal it offers everyone: cross-license and pay a low rate. Apple refused because they believed Motorola was undervaluing their patents in the cross-licensing offer. Since Apple rejected the normal patent licensing terms, Motorola wants more money to compensate them for the fact that Apple won't be cross-licensing like everyone else (Apple is already paying above FRAND rates to Nokia for exactly the same reasons). Perhaps the numbers Motorola is asking for are high, but "abusing FRAND patents" is too strong a statement for my tastes. If Apple doesn't want the standard licensing terms, then they should have to pay more money. This seems fair to me. The devils is in the details, however. In this case, how much more is appropriate?
You are correct that FRAND does not require you to put patents into a pool, but if you choose not to cross-license or pool your patents, then the FRAND patent holders are free to charge you more money than those who did. The sticking point from the beginning has been how do you value the patents in the pool and patent cross-licensing in general. If you place a high value on them, then by Apple not contributing, they should pay a high cash fee. Conversely, if you place a low value on the patents in the pool and cross-licensing deals, then by not contributing, Apple should still pay a low rate. Motorola offered a cross-licensing deal to Apple and in turn Apple would pay the same rate as everyone else. Apple rejected it by claiming that Motorola was not correctly valuing its patents.
First off, this isn't going to effect corporate users at all. This system is not going to be implemented for servers and corporate IT departments will control their own systems (and certainly sign them with they own keys).
As for consumers, the largest current Linux distro is Mint. Unfortunately, according to Fedora, keys will only work with the core distro and not with distros based on that core. This means that Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, etc. will each need their own keys. Which, in turn, means that the majority of consumer Linux users will not be covered unless each of the largest distros and the large distros based on them receive keys.
The real concern here is not that hardcore Linux users won't be able to circumvent the system, the concern is that it will become more difficult to convert new users to Linux, BSD, etc. in the consumer space.
Personally, I don't think a simple, standardized interface that allows a person to turn off, on and customize their UEFI secure boot would not be too onerous of a requirement for hardware manufacturers.
According to Fedora, their key will only work for Fedora. This means that the Fedora based distributions, like Scientific Linux and CentOS, will not be covered by the Fedora key and will have to get their own.
You are correct. I read the transcript on Groklaw a little too quickly I think. A more thorough read and it now appears as if the statutory damages will be addressed if the case survives appeal. Am I a little too lazy to look up section 2 of their existing stipulation, so I may be wrong again. Feel free to correct.
Oracle: Defer statutory damages until resolution. Parties agree that we need to address statutory damages. Agree to an amount to reach finality. If the case returns to court on appeal...
Judge: Is there any way that the statutory damages could come back to life, or is that gone forever?
0racle: This is governed by section 2 of the existing stipulation.
Happy to see the corrections, hope they get modded up.
I am using prices here in the bigger sense; the value of exchange (including labor), and not in the more conventional financial sense. It is more like free-market vs. centrally-planned economy. This whole exercise is a simplistic comparison and I recognize this, but the point was to dispel the idea that wages cannot be set by the market under a Socialist system. Unlike Fascism or Capitalism, which are closely associated with command and free-market economies respectively, Socialism has plentiful ideological support for either system.
In a simplistic form, Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Fascism could all be differentiated as economic systems using only two factors; who owns the means of production and who sets market prices.
Communism: The means of production are collectively owned and the government sets the prices Socialism: The government owns the means of production and either the market or the government sets the prices. Fascism: The means of production are privately owned and the government sets the prices. Capitalism: The means of production are privately owned and the market sets the prices.
Therefore, having wages commensurate with skill could also be a socialist notion (market socialism) as the market would be setting the price of labor. This concept was popularized by one of the founders of Neo-Classical Economics and the Lausanne School, Leon Walrus (d.1910).
And yet many judges have decided that Samsung did not violate Apple's designs, starting with Apple's opening salvo in the Netherlands. Apple's design is of a rounded cornered rectangle with a display in the center (that's it). Any media device could be seen to violate it.
Apple is suing Samsung because they are their biggest competitor. Samsung outsold Apple in smartphones for 2011 by 5.5 million units and widened their lead in the first quarter of 2012 to 10 million more units (45 million to 35 million). Samsung has also made tablet inroads and are now the number two tablet company. Smartphones are the cash cow of both Apple and Samsung. Apple's marketshare in smartphones has fallen to 23% while Android has increased to 56%. This has to concern Apple.
It was a two part trial. One part was on copyright infringement and the other part was on patent infringement. The outcome was that Google violated Oracle copyrights on 9 lines of code (out of 15 million) and some test cases. Google was not found to have infringed on any Oracle patents. The judge decided that the damages amounted to $0 for the copyright violations. Oracle can appeal.
Deists did not believe that God was knowable, but they believed that God created a universe that behaved according to Reason and rules. They did not believe in an interventionist God. They had faith that something created the universe, but that the universe itself was a rational and reasonable place.
My daughter has that phone. It is very slow and the battery life is terrible with the stock rom, but once it is rooted and running the backside mod, it works fine (nearly doubled the battery life) and overclocking helps greatly with the speed.
I love my phone on Virgin Mobile. It isn't the latest, greatest hardware, but its fantastic for the price. The problem with the Android phones I have had is that they are terrible stock, but can be great phones once rooted and have a decent mod on them.
There is a difference between a creator God and a God who actively intervenes, changing the rules at its whim. The former creates logic, rules for us to discover. This God is perfectly compatible with Science. This is the God of Enlightenment thinkers and the Deist creators of the United States. There is no need for pure faith with this God, only the need to discover the Universe as it has been created. This God answers the question of why, but allows us to discover the how. The belief in God does not preclude the belief in Science, but not all Gods, nor even all Christian Gods, are compatible with Reason.
I guess I still don't understand how this addresses my argument. Just to remind you, the argument being addressed was that Apple can monopolize the entire production of high end screens (which is what I was arguing against). Are you suggesting that Samsung, with $3.8 billion in profit last quarter would not invest in a new factory for high end screens without Apple because that factory would lose significant (more) money? Samsung's display division lost $19 million last quarter. Certainly how they depreciated these factories played a role, but I still don't see any evidence that Samsung would not invest in high end displays without Apple. Nor do I see evidence that they would threaten their own products (to which they allocated 70% of their profits) by selling their entire high-end display capacity to Apple. If anything, I see a company that does not view display manufacturing as a profit center and is willing to lose money on it in order to build their own products.
As for the perspective necessary to analyze this; Samsung, LG, and Sharp are not viewing each factory individually when making their business decisions. For the purposes of this argument, analyzing all their business (not just the factories), is, I believe, the proper perspective.
I don't see how this addresses the argument. Both Samsung and LG have low and high end products. Since their own products have much higher profit margins, they will favor their own products over Apple. The primary advantage for these companies is that making products for Apple, among others, helps them reach a scale, build and retain expertise, etc. that reduces the cost for their own products.
If, on the other hand, you have some evidence that making screens is a high margin business, I would love to see it. I just don't see how anything else makes sense for these companies, regardless of how they depreciate their assets.
I don't know how many white collar prisons are still around (at least in the US). Former Gov Blagojevich is in the same prison that once housed Timothy McVeigh for instance (in the middle of suburban Denver with a nice view of the mountains).
If that is true (I don't know what the numbers are), then high end screens account for 4 million out of 55 million screens sold or about 7%. While margins are undoubtedly higher on those screens, it doesn't really address the issue of which has more weight with manufacturers, the 7% at the top or the 93% at the bottom. Your argument depends on the profit margins of those 7% of screens. According to Digitimes, Apple pays over $150 each for the screens, which is about 3x the price of a run-of-the-mill laptop screen and $50 more per screen than Asus pays for its IPS panels. It doesn't give us any insight into profit margins, but it is possible that margins are high enough for those components to be worth more than the 93%.
We also know that two of Apple's three main suppliers, LG and Sharp, both lost significant money last year (but screens are a small part of their businesses), while Apple's other supplier, Samsung, made lots of money, but 70% of their profit was came from their own phones, tablets, and laptops.
Without more information, the only lesson I see here is that components in general are not a very profitable business, which means that Apple's suppliers have a strong incentive to favor their own products over Apple's. While Apple, no doubt, wields influence at these companies, I am not seeing the kinds of revenue and profits that would allow Apple to dictate terms or buy out supplies of components also desired by these companies own products ( as suggested above).
Money is money. If the phones are profitable, then continue to pursue them while you move in another direction. Consider Samsung, they are the smartphone leader right now, shipping 38 million smartphones last quarter (compared to Apple's 31 million). They also shipped 48 million dumb phones during the same period. I don't hear anything from them about dumping their dumb phone business. It goes to show that you can be both a smart and dumb phone company.
This reminds me very much of the recent HP shortsightedness with their low margin computer business.
So it's not just buying up entire supplies (when you think about it, if a Mac sells a million units, that's a million screens - a rather considerable amount of product to produce. Not counting ones that fail Apple QC and end up on the secondary market as cheap monitors).
Apple is a big player and a million screens may sound like a lot, but they sold only 3.6 million laptops last quarter (compare that to HP which sold 8.9 million). This is out of the nearly 55 million laptops sold globally last quarter (not year, quarter). Which means, companies like Sharp, LG, and Samsung sold more than 50 million of their 55 million screens to someone other than Apple in the first three months of this year. It makes me wonder if you are overestimating Apple's importance to display manufacturers.
I am arguing that the patent should not be valid. Obviously, the patent was issued, so it is valid unless a court decides otherwise. I would rather see design patents reserved for distinguishing product designs. I believe that no one should be able to control the basic, functional design of a product, forcing every other company to embellish their products or choose a less efficient design (unless Apple wants to pursue a utility patent). Apple is welcome to take a minimalist design in their products, but I don't think the government should be granting them a monopoly on doing so.
I respect your opinion and see it as a reasonable one, but I don't agree with it.
Others are waiting for high res OLED displays to be ready I suspect. Apple decided not to wait and for the iPad3 went with an LED backlit display, but companies like Samsung are not going to follow suit until OLED has matured. That and Samsung has sunk a fortune into OLED and see it as the future.
FYI, Apple has applied for a number of patents on drivers and such for OLED displays this year. It looks like they are considering moving in that direction as well.
Slashdot Mirror
What is most interesting to me about this is that patents were originally created to encourage companies to share their designs instead of hording trade secrets. In the current climate, however, many companies are more inclined to keep their products closed source rather than risk having someone sue them for patent violation. Perversely, a highly litigious patent climate encourages the exact behavior that patents were intended to remedy.
The question for me is should it be illegal to create a domain with a similar name to an active domain and setup an email server with similar names? I don't see anything wrong with this. There could legitimately be two companies with similar names. If the companies received each other's emails, would a crime or tort have been committed?
This seems to me to be one of those cases where the wrong laws are being applied. He used legitimate tools to further a criminal enterprise. In my opinion, he should be charged for extortion, unjust enrichment, or conversion, http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Conversion_(law), but not for illegally intercepting communications.
As far as I can tell, your post is in complete agreement with mine. Nokia and Motorola preferred patent cross-licensing. Apple felt their patents were being undervalued by those companies. In the case with Nokia, Apple had to make sizable cash payments in lieu of licensing what they considered their core patents for the iPhone.
Two story lines really interest me here. First, Apple entering, and effectively disrupting, the phone market. These companies are used to patent cross-licensing in order to create market stability. Enter Apple, which really doesn't seem to be interested in stability, but rather enjoy being disruptive (I am not using disruptive in a negative sense here). Secondly, the difficulty in valuing Apple's software patents versus the established companies hardware patents. None of the big established companies valued Apple's patents very high (or not nearly as high as Apple values their own patents). As the phone market continues to move toward more software driven products, this will continue to be a big issue.
Motorola offered Apple the same deal it offers everyone: cross-license and pay a low rate. Apple refused because they believed Motorola was undervaluing their patents in the cross-licensing offer. Since Apple rejected the normal patent licensing terms, Motorola wants more money to compensate them for the fact that Apple won't be cross-licensing like everyone else (Apple is already paying above FRAND rates to Nokia for exactly the same reasons). Perhaps the numbers Motorola is asking for are high, but "abusing FRAND patents" is too strong a statement for my tastes. If Apple doesn't want the standard licensing terms, then they should have to pay more money. This seems fair to me. The devils is in the details, however. In this case, how much more is appropriate?
You are correct that FRAND does not require you to put patents into a pool, but if you choose not to cross-license or pool your patents, then the FRAND patent holders are free to charge you more money than those who did. The sticking point from the beginning has been how do you value the patents in the pool and patent cross-licensing in general. If you place a high value on them, then by Apple not contributing, they should pay a high cash fee. Conversely, if you place a low value on the patents in the pool and cross-licensing deals, then by not contributing, Apple should still pay a low rate. Motorola offered a cross-licensing deal to Apple and in turn Apple would pay the same rate as everyone else. Apple rejected it by claiming that Motorola was not correctly valuing its patents.
First off, this isn't going to effect corporate users at all. This system is not going to be implemented for servers and corporate IT departments will control their own systems (and certainly sign them with they own keys).
As for consumers, the largest current Linux distro is Mint. Unfortunately, according to Fedora, keys will only work with the core distro and not with distros based on that core. This means that Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, etc. will each need their own keys. Which, in turn, means that the majority of consumer Linux users will not be covered unless each of the largest distros and the large distros based on them receive keys.
The real concern here is not that hardcore Linux users won't be able to circumvent the system, the concern is that it will become more difficult to convert new users to Linux, BSD, etc. in the consumer space.
Personally, I don't think a simple, standardized interface that allows a person to turn off, on and customize their UEFI secure boot would not be too onerous of a requirement for hardware manufacturers.
According to Fedora, their key will only work for Fedora. This means that the Fedora based distributions, like Scientific Linux and CentOS, will not be covered by the Fedora key and will have to get their own.
You are correct. I read the transcript on Groklaw a little too quickly I think. A more thorough read and it now appears as if the statutory damages will be addressed if the case survives appeal. Am I a little too lazy to look up section 2 of their existing stipulation, so I may be wrong again. Feel free to correct.
Oracle: Defer statutory damages until resolution. Parties agree that we need to address statutory damages. Agree to an amount to reach finality. If the case returns to court on appeal...
Judge: Is there any way that the statutory damages could come back to life, or is that gone forever?
0racle: This is governed by section 2 of the existing stipulation.
Happy to see the corrections, hope they get modded up.
I am using prices here in the bigger sense; the value of exchange (including labor), and not in the more conventional financial sense. It is more like free-market vs. centrally-planned economy. This whole exercise is a simplistic comparison and I recognize this, but the point was to dispel the idea that wages cannot be set by the market under a Socialist system. Unlike Fascism or Capitalism, which are closely associated with command and free-market economies respectively, Socialism has plentiful ideological support for either system.
In a simplistic form, Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Fascism could all be differentiated as economic systems using only two factors; who owns the means of production and who sets market prices.
Communism: The means of production are collectively owned and the government sets the prices
Socialism: The government owns the means of production and either the market or the government sets the prices.
Fascism: The means of production are privately owned and the government sets the prices.
Capitalism: The means of production are privately owned and the market sets the prices.
Therefore, having wages commensurate with skill could also be a socialist notion (market socialism) as the market would be setting the price of labor. This concept was popularized by one of the founders of Neo-Classical Economics and the Lausanne School, Leon Walrus (d.1910).
And yet many judges have decided that Samsung did not violate Apple's designs, starting with Apple's opening salvo in the Netherlands. Apple's design is of a rounded cornered rectangle with a display in the center (that's it). Any media device could be seen to violate it.
Apple is suing Samsung because they are their biggest competitor. Samsung outsold Apple in smartphones for 2011 by 5.5 million units and widened their lead in the first quarter of 2012 to 10 million more units (45 million to 35 million). Samsung has also made tablet inroads and are now the number two tablet company. Smartphones are the cash cow of both Apple and Samsung. Apple's marketshare in smartphones has fallen to 23% while Android has increased to 56%. This has to concern Apple.
It was a two part trial. One part was on copyright infringement and the other part was on patent infringement. The outcome was that Google violated Oracle copyrights on 9 lines of code (out of 15 million) and some test cases. Google was not found to have infringed on any Oracle patents. The judge decided that the damages amounted to $0 for the copyright violations. Oracle can appeal.
Deists did not believe that God was knowable, but they believed that God created a universe that behaved according to Reason and rules. They did not believe in an interventionist God. They had faith that something created the universe, but that the universe itself was a rational and reasonable place.
My daughter has that phone. It is very slow and the battery life is terrible with the stock rom, but once it is rooted and running the backside mod, it works fine (nearly doubled the battery life) and overclocking helps greatly with the speed.
I love my phone on Virgin Mobile. It isn't the latest, greatest hardware, but its fantastic for the price. The problem with the Android phones I have had is that they are terrible stock, but can be great phones once rooted and have a decent mod on them.
There is a difference between a creator God and a God who actively intervenes, changing the rules at its whim. The former creates logic, rules for us to discover. This God is perfectly compatible with Science. This is the God of Enlightenment thinkers and the Deist creators of the United States. There is no need for pure faith with this God, only the need to discover the Universe as it has been created. This God answers the question of why, but allows us to discover the how. The belief in God does not preclude the belief in Science, but not all Gods, nor even all Christian Gods, are compatible with Reason.
I guess I still don't understand how this addresses my argument. Just to remind you, the argument being addressed was that Apple can monopolize the entire production of high end screens (which is what I was arguing against). Are you suggesting that Samsung, with $3.8 billion in profit last quarter would not invest in a new factory for high end screens without Apple because that factory would lose significant (more) money? Samsung's display division lost $19 million last quarter. Certainly how they depreciated these factories played a role, but I still don't see any evidence that Samsung would not invest in high end displays without Apple. Nor do I see evidence that they would threaten their own products (to which they allocated 70% of their profits) by selling their entire high-end display capacity to Apple. If anything, I see a company that does not view display manufacturing as a profit center and is willing to lose money on it in order to build their own products.
As for the perspective necessary to analyze this; Samsung, LG, and Sharp are not viewing each factory individually when making their business decisions. For the purposes of this argument, analyzing all their business (not just the factories), is, I believe, the proper perspective.
I don't see how this addresses the argument. Both Samsung and LG have low and high end products. Since their own products have much higher profit margins, they will favor their own products over Apple. The primary advantage for these companies is that making products for Apple, among others, helps them reach a scale, build and retain expertise, etc. that reduces the cost for their own products.
If, on the other hand, you have some evidence that making screens is a high margin business, I would love to see it. I just don't see how anything else makes sense for these companies, regardless of how they depreciate their assets.
If he lived today, Willie Sutton would be on Wall Street.
I don't know how many white collar prisons are still around (at least in the US). Former Gov Blagojevich is in the same prison that once housed Timothy McVeigh for instance (in the middle of suburban Denver with a nice view of the mountains).
If that is true (I don't know what the numbers are), then high end screens account for 4 million out of 55 million screens sold or about 7%. While margins are undoubtedly higher on those screens, it doesn't really address the issue of which has more weight with manufacturers, the 7% at the top or the 93% at the bottom. Your argument depends on the profit margins of those 7% of screens. According to Digitimes, Apple pays over $150 each for the screens, which is about 3x the price of a run-of-the-mill laptop screen and $50 more per screen than Asus pays for its IPS panels. It doesn't give us any insight into profit margins, but it is possible that margins are high enough for those components to be worth more than the 93%.
We also know that two of Apple's three main suppliers, LG and Sharp, both lost significant money last year (but screens are a small part of their businesses), while Apple's other supplier, Samsung, made lots of money, but 70% of their profit was came from their own phones, tablets, and laptops.
Without more information, the only lesson I see here is that components in general are not a very profitable business, which means that Apple's suppliers have a strong incentive to favor their own products over Apple's. While Apple, no doubt, wields influence at these companies, I am not seeing the kinds of revenue and profits that would allow Apple to dictate terms or buy out supplies of components also desired by these companies own products ( as suggested above).
http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/150674/apple-rumored-to-pay-at-least-150-for-macbook-pro-retina-display-panels
Money is money. If the phones are profitable, then continue to pursue them while you move in another direction. Consider Samsung, they are the smartphone leader right now, shipping 38 million smartphones last quarter (compared to Apple's 31 million). They also shipped 48 million dumb phones during the same period. I don't hear anything from them about dumping their dumb phone business. It goes to show that you can be both a smart and dumb phone company.
This reminds me very much of the recent HP shortsightedness with their low margin computer business.
So it's not just buying up entire supplies (when you think about it, if a Mac sells a million units, that's a million screens - a rather considerable amount of product to produce. Not counting ones that fail Apple QC and end up on the secondary market as cheap monitors).
Apple is a big player and a million screens may sound like a lot, but they sold only 3.6 million laptops last quarter (compare that to HP which sold 8.9 million). This is out of the nearly 55 million laptops sold globally last quarter (not year, quarter). Which means, companies like Sharp, LG, and Samsung sold more than 50 million of their 55 million screens to someone other than Apple in the first three months of this year. It makes me wonder if you are overestimating Apple's importance to display manufacturers.
I am arguing that the patent should not be valid. Obviously, the patent was issued, so it is valid unless a court decides otherwise. I would rather see design patents reserved for distinguishing product designs. I believe that no one should be able to control the basic, functional design of a product, forcing every other company to embellish their products or choose a less efficient design (unless Apple wants to pursue a utility patent). Apple is welcome to take a minimalist design in their products, but I don't think the government should be granting them a monopoly on doing so.
I respect your opinion and see it as a reasonable one, but I don't agree with it.
Others are waiting for high res OLED displays to be ready I suspect. Apple decided not to wait and for the iPad3 went with an LED backlit display, but companies like Samsung are not going to follow suit until OLED has matured. That and Samsung has sunk a fortune into OLED and see it as the future.
FYI, Apple has applied for a number of patents on drivers and such for OLED displays this year. It looks like they are considering moving in that direction as well.